The Lone Ranger - 2 stars

This movie really annoyed me.  I think part of my feelings are from the knowledge that Disney is trying so hard to duplicate their Pirates of the Carribean success.  They could have made a nice Lone Ranger movie.  Instead they had to make it a $250 million blockbuster tentpole movie.  It's overblown with special effects and the running time is a ridiculous 2 1/2 hours.

One problem is Johnny Depp as Tonto.  For one thing, his schtick is wearing thin.  I didn't enjoy much of what he was trying to do.  Another problem is he's a bigger star than Armie Hammer.  So instead of the movie being about the Lone Ranger with Tonto as his sidekick, it's as much Tonto's movie as the Lone Ranger's.  That doesn't really work.

There is a completely unnecessary framing device to this movie.  The movie starts in the 1930s with a kid running into an elderly Tonto at some kind of wild west exhibit.  Tonto tells the kid the story of the Lone Ranger, so the entire movie is basically a flashback. 

The tone is all over the place.  It jumps between serious action and danger, then it becomes a goofy comedy, then it's a cartoon, and all over again.  It doesn't work when one minute we're seeing the aftermath of the genocide of an entire indian tribe, and the next minute a horse is standing in a tree wearing a cowboy hat.  That's just too much.

I don't think the Lone Ranger and Tonto had much chemistry together.  I just didn't really care about the characters, and I was bored for most of the movie.  The only enjoyable part was the climax involving the characters fighting on top of 2 trains.  There was some really fun stuff in this sequence, but it didn't make up for the 2 hours that preceeded it.  Oh, and Helena Bonham Carter adds nothing to this movie.  She shows up for a couple scenes looking like she just stepped out of a Tim Burton movie.  Her scenes could easily have been cut without affecting the movie at all.